AI Bubble, Dead SaaS & Why the UK Needs a Quantum Lane | Ben Prade

📅 July 23, 2026

About This Episode

Ben Prade is a Partner at Bullhound Capital (formerly GP Bullhound), where he's spent close to a decade building out the firm's growth investment strategy across frontier tech. In this episode, he joins Aarish to unpack why venture capital still doesn't know how to price AI companies and what that means for founders, funds, and the future of software.
📌 In this episode:

💰 Why SaaS multiples break down for AI companies and the case for usage-based pricing
🪙 Tokenomics: the biggest unsolved problem in AI right now
💀 The "SaaS-pocalypse" — is software really dying, or just changing shape?
📖 Why fundraising is fundamentally a storytelling process
⚛️ The UK's quantum bet: Oxford Quantum Circuits' £260m round and government backing
🌍 Sovereign LPs vs. unrestricted private capital — the trade-off funds can't avoid
📈 Late-stage capital in Europe — concentrate power in a few lead investors, or chase the US model?
🐒 Managing the "inner monkey" — the human side of building, investing, and storytelling

💬 "Fundraising is a storytelling process, always. One of the most wonderful things about humans is that they will ignore facts and figures and always believe a good story." — Ben Prade

Note: This episode was recorded on 4th June, some things may well have changed since the date of recording.

Find Ben Prade online at:

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ben-prade-182b8513a/
Twitter: https://x.com/Pradey
Bullhound Capital: www.bullhoundcapital.com

This episode is sponsored by EmergeOne, fractional CFOs for venture backed tech startups from Seed to Series B.
Get in touch at https://emergeone.co.uk/contact-us/ or join the CFO team at https://emergeone.co.uk/join-the-cfo-team/

Sign up for EmergeOne’s weekly newsletter, Off Balance at https://off-balance.beehiiv.com/subscribe

#VentureCapital #DeepTech #QuantumComputing #AI #Tokenomics #StartupFunding #FractionalCFO #NothingVentured #EmergeOne

Watch on YouTube: AI Bubble, Dead SaaS & Why the UK Needs a Quantum Lane | Ben Prade